UFO Sweden (2022) Film Review – A Smart Sci-Fi Thriller From Sweden [Toronto After Dark Film Festival] Creating viral stories around a piece of media to pump up the audience’s interest is not an uncommon practice. Despite what people might think, this is not the case with PTSD Radio. As a result of careless reporting, readers are more interested in the supposed phenomena surrounding the manga than its content, which is a real shame. It does not really matter if Nakayama experienced the effects of a curse or not because he never intended for this to be the focal point of his work. While it is a disturbing tale that can parallel the likes of Ju-On, PTSD Radio is a real source of horror that you cannot miss if you are into this kind of manga. Recently, disturbing news regarding Masaaki Nakayama, a horror manga author known for his manga Fuan no Tane (2013), has been circulating online. According to many social media posts, he has stopped working in his most recent work to “stay alive”. Dramatic as it sounds, even some relatively reliable sources have been echoing this information as gospel truth.

Famed for the likes of Nemuri no Fuchi and Fuan no Tane, horror-manga veteran Masaaki Nakayama provides another reason to keep us up at night.

This was not a good idea though. It seemed that whatever was haunting him did not want him to talk about it, because the disgrace around him increased. For this reason, he put on hold the publication of further extra chapters involving his old office but not PTSD Radio itself. Is PTSD Radio still on hiatus? Shortly after settling in his new studio, he suffered from Idiopathic Thrombocytopenic Purpura (ITP). Curiously, this happened right after talking with his team about what happened in the previous office. After recovering and trying to make sense of everything, he decided to tell his experience through these extra chapters.

Now as for the rumors, this is what really happened with Masaaki Nakayama. According to the extra chapters included in volumes 5 and 6 of PTSD Radio, he indeed started to experience strange occurrences. However, the source of them is not the manga itself, but the office he used as a studio for its production. Carried into modern Japan from a forgotten past, the being known as Ogushi haunts and tortures humans of all kinds. Little is know about Ogushi's curse, except that it resides in an unexpected place: human hair. As mentioned before, PTSD Radio was never on hiatus due to the alleged supernatural tragedies suffered by the author. Nevertheless, the manga was paused at some point after volume 6. The cause of this happening is quite boring in comparison to the rumors. PTSD Radio was published in Nemesis, a bimonthly manga magazine that has been discontinued since 2018. Due to this, now Nakayama’s serialization has been transferred to another digital publication, Comic Days. This change probably stalled a bit the publication of new chapters, but as of December 2022, Nakayama is working on new chapters for PTSD Radio. Funnily enough, he is aware of the rumors about his work, and he believes this is a result of misinformation and limited research.An unseen hand tugs at your braid. You find an old box with only a tangled mess of dark hair inside. You open a door in your home only to witness a river of curls slinking away, an ominous lump at its heart. Like Junji Ito's Uzumaki, PTSD Radio takes something everyday and weaves it into a series of chilling, cryptic, twisted, repellant, and alluring manga stories that become more than what they first seem. For those drawn in by the hypnotic spirals of Uzumaki, this is your moment. Start coloring every single one of the spirals yourself!

From what they say, his latest manga PTSD Radio is so abhorrent that it has started to affect his health. Reports of Nakayama suffering Idiopathic Thrombocytopenic Purpura (ITP) all of the sudden during its production are often mentioned to confirm this alleged curse. The fact that PTSD Radio is apparently on hiatus since its sixth volume seems to corroborate the author’s reticence to keep working on this manga.